asting their eyes toward the rich, arable lands of Pennsylvania, members of the Moravian community purchased a 500 acre tract of land north of Philadelphia in 1741. There, along the Lehigh River, they organized and built the communal society of Bethlehem, which became the base location for all Moravian missionary activity in North America. In 1780, an observer wrote:

The first time I visited Bethlehem...[when] issuing out of the woods at the close of the evening in the month of May, [ I ] found myself on a beautiful extensive plain, with the vast eastern branch of the Delaware on the right, richly interspersed with wooded islands, and at the distance of a mile in front the town of Bethlehem, rearing its large stone edifices out of a forest, situated on a majestic, but gradually rising eminence, the background formed the setting sun. So novel and unexpected a transition filled the mind with a thousand singular and sublime ideas and made an impression on me never to be effaced.1

¹Remarks made by Grieve, the translator of the Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782, (reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1963), 648-649.